Certain service providers that offer Video-on-Demand (VoD) content use servers at metropolitan offices (e.g., Video Hub Offices (VHOs)) to store all of the videos in their library. Content and network service providers are facing substantial growth in the demand for VoD content. With the rapid increase in library sizes, it may become burdensome or infeasible to replicate the entire library at each metropolitan office. Each of these VHOs may have a large number of servers to store and serve videos. Further, these VHOs may be inter-connected using a high-bandwidth backbone. To deal with the high demand, a provider may replicate the entire library at each VHO. This may allow the provider to circumvent problems such as content popularity prediction and overload due to flash crowds.
Despite disk space being plentiful and affordable, replicating the entire library at each VHO may be economically burdensome or infeasible. The cost of a gigabyte of storage may be decreasing; however, the video libraries are also growing. The rate of creation of content, the ever-increasing demand for high-quality content (e.g., high-definition, 3-D video), and the space needed to store the content appears to be outpacing the ability of providers to economically add storage and replicate content at each office.